Quality versus Quantity: Challenging Paradigms of Women's Inclusion in Peace Negotiations

Since the landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and even more since the Global 1325 review (2015), a lot of attention has been given to the representation of women at the peace table, as women still remain significantly underrepresented. Most discussions on women’s inclusion in the policy and scholarly world have concentrated on normative arguments fed by a number of quantitative studies showing a correlation between women’s inclusion and post-agreement violence reduction. This Paper takes issue with this debate and argues that there is a need to shift the debate from the ‘counting of women’ to the assessment of the quality of their participation, as well as the enabling and constraining conditions under which that can happen. Quality is thereby understood as the influence women have on the agenda-setting and outcomes of the negotiations instead of a mere token representation. The Paper takes the following approach: it first looks into the existing scholarly and policy literature on women’s political inclusion into peace negotiations followed by a comparative analysis of 28 peace negotiation case studies and women participation therein. The paper builds on the inclusion modality framework developed by Paffenholz (2014), as well as data from the Broadening Participation Project (http://www.inclusivepeace.org/content/broadening-participation). The result presented aims at contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the role of women in peace negotiations that is based on in-depth qualitative case study analysis instead of normative hopes and large N-quantitative studies only.